Love Poet, Carpenter
Michael Longley at Seventy

Michael Longley has been acknowledged as one of our greatest living poets. Longley is also a poet of variety and influence, working in a number of modes and excelling in all of them. Longley is always celebrating the gentleness, transience and beauty of life. This book offers a celebration of the celebrant.

Mayo; whether it's of the 'heroic' dead of the Great War or the diminished dead of the ghettoes or the camps; whether he is describing a flight of birds or a wild flower, Michael Longley is always celebrating the gentleness, transience and beauty of life. As he says in the one-line poem "Lost": 'my lost lamb lovelier than all the wool'. This book, then, is a celebration of the celebrant.

With contributions from: Fleur Adcock * Michael Allen * Simon Armitage * John Banville * Sebastian Barry * Fran Brearton * John Burnside * David Cabot * Ciaran Carson * Douglas Carson * Gillian Clarke * Patricia Craig * Robert Crawford * Kevin Crossley-Holland * Gerald Dawe * Greg Delanty * Eamon Duffy * Ian Duhig * Douglas Dunn * Paul Durcan * Paul Farley * James Fenton * Leontia Flynn * Alan Gillis * Eamon Grennan * Donald Hall * Kerry Hardie * Dermot Healy * Seamus Heaney * Kathleen Jamie * Dillon Johnston * Robert Johnstone * Fergal Keane * Brendan Kennelly * Nick Laird * Sarah Longley *Tom MacIntyre * Thomas McCarthy * Peter McDonald * Medbh McGuckian * Derek Mahon * John Montague * Jeffrey Morgan * Sinead Morrissey * Andrew Motion * Paul Muldoon * Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill * Bernard O'Donoghue * Dennis O'Driscoll * Sharon Olds * Caitriona O'Reilly * Frank Ormsby * Don Paterson * Glenn Patterson * Justin Quinn * Piotr Sommer * Anne Tannahill * Adam Thorpe * Anthony Thwaite * Michael Viney * David Wheatley